VEB recovery to VMware

[mbreitba]

I'm curious about the magic that is done in the recovery CD that allows backups to be recovered to dissimilar hardware. I'm attempting to recover to a VMware environment and love the idea of just dumping a VMDK back into my environment and then mounting it to a VM. I've tried that, and failed miserably (as it seems others have). I've also used the recovery ISO to successfully recover a backup into a VM but it's tedious and I don't think a scaleable option for P2V recovery. I know that isn't where this product is targeted, but it seems like it's a no-brainer for future development.

Has anyone successfully been able to recover a full-system backup to a VMDK, and then power it on in VMware with no major modifications?

[Gostev]

Funny you should ask, as we were just able to do this with Azure, basically just for fun - we did an export to VHD, then copied VHD to Azure, attached to a VM, powered on... and it worked. We were actually quite shocked, as this was totally unexpected. However, keep in mind that this was a very basic Windows desktop with stock Windows drivers, which perhaps contributed to a success.

Generally speaking, you can expect anything like this to fail in over 90% of cases, because each Windows installation has extremely deep tie-ups into hardware via drivers, and can only survive certain type of hardware changes automatically (and only a few at a time). But since in case of going to a hypervisor, virtually every hardware changes (pun intended), in vast majority of cases Windows will simply refuse to boot due to those rivers brought from physical system screwing everything up.

[mbreitba]

I kinda figured that was the case. Just for grins I'm going to try installing VMware tools on my laptop _prior_ to the backup and see if it'll not completely die when I export as a VMDK. I don't have a lot of confidence in that, but figured I'd give it a shot.